Marin bass player, 91, leans into gig at seniors’ home
Don Rossman first became aware of the piano player in 2012.
A new arrival at Drake Terrace assisted living center in San Rafael at the time, Rossman remembers hearing that there would be some old-time piano music at the center’s community room that Saturday. He went down to check it out.
“This guy’s cool,” Rossman, 91, said he thought at the time. A musician himself who formerly played with the popular Bay Area band Swing Society, Rossman approached the stage.
“Do you mind if I sit in?” Rossman asked the piano player, Jason Myers of San Anselmo. It proved to be a magic moment.
“All of sudden, this guy shows up,” recalled Myers, 55. “He’s got an upright bass. He said he’s played all that stuff himself.”
Twelve years later, the duo are still at it, performing at Drake Terrace’s happy hour every other Saturday.
“It’s definitely been fun,” said Myers, who performs around Marin and the Bay Area an average of five nights a week while running a professional house cleaning business. “The residents definitely enjoy having him play.”
The Drake Terrace gig is the only care center or retirement community out of Myers’ busy schedule where a resident plays along with him, he said.
For Rossman, who lost his wife of 65 years, Connie, in 2021, and one of his two children last year, the chance to keep his music flowing is a blessing.
“This is the highlight of my life living here,” Rossman said. “The opportunity to play with Jason.”
Rossman’s music career started when he was a sophomore in high school in upstate New York. He began with tuba, but then switched to upright bass so that he could be in the school orchestra.
“A week later, my father is walking in the front door with a bass fiddle under his arm and says, ‘I gave that guy $75 for this thing, so you better learn to play it.’” The year was 1948.
After high school in New York, college at Syracuse University and a stint in advertising, Rossman moved to San Francisco, working in real estate and the medical instruments business.
He returned to upstate New York in the 1970s, but then came back to California, this time settling in Marin.
“It wasn’t until I got back here that it took off again,” Rossman said of his music.
In 1982, Rossman joined the Swing Society. He played with the band until the COVID-19 pandemic. With the band now inactive, the Drake Terrace gig keeps him going, he said.
“It’s a positive and strong part of my life,” he said. “I’d be lost without it. It’s in my soul.”
Myers, who grew up in Selinsgrove, a town north of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, started playing piano when he was 14.
After toying with classical and popular music for about two years, Myers said a friend asked if he knew how to play “Moonglow” and “Deep Purple,” two jazz hits from the 1930s.
Myers found a book of jazz standards, learned to play them — and never looked back.
After college in Boston, Myers moved to the East Bay in 1989. From there, he embedded into the jazz community, studying with mentor Dick Hindman, a prominent Bay Area jazz pianist.
In addition to his solo gigs, Myers also has performed with a trio for the last 10 years. His stint at Drake Terrace, which started in 2005, is one of several retirement communities in Marin where he performs.
“Since I have a large repertoire of music from the ’20s to the ’40s, I felt like I might as well play for people who grew up with that music,” Myers said.
The music also blends well with his affinity for the senior population, he added. When he was a teenager, he volunteered to play in a nursing home one summer.
“Since I’ve been a young kid, I’ve always been drawn to older folks,” Myers said.
The duo’s repertoire includes big-band classics such as “Fly Me to the Moon” and “Moon over Miami,” according to Kiko Campos-Bautista, a Drake Terrace manager.
Rossman’s neighbors, inspired by the songs from their era, will often get up to dance and enjoy themselves, Campos-Bautista said.
“Don demonstrates the power of music,” Campos-Bautista said. “He is a talent for sure — at 91 years.”